My favourite magazine at the moment is Intelligent Life. It has been one of my favourite things, let alone magazines, ever since I picked it up in 2008, and will probably remain so for the foreseeable future. It’s smart, but not stuffy or stuck-up, and it covers such a range of amazing topics that I’m never bored by it. (I even read the articles on sport. Even when they’re on cricket or something I have absolutely no understanding of. It’s THAT good.) It’s only quarterly though, which leaves a big gap in my life in terms of light reading material.

Making magazine, February 2011 issue

So this Sunday, while I was out picking up some essentials, I went into the nearest shop with a giant magazine rack determined to find something I might enjoy. I found myself searching through the crafty magazines for something fun, and hopefully something that would give me some ideas. My eyes landed on Making magazine, which looked fairly fresh and with-it. The February issue is ‘The Light Issue’ and it had a pretty awesome origami hanging light made out of maps on the cover. It also promised a how-to for making your own lampshade, as well as a few sewing projects, some recipes, and various other bits and bobs. I figured it was worth a go, so I took it home, made myself a dark and stormy, and dove in.

I expect a lot from a magazine that costs £4.99. Good design, articles that hold my interest, and some kind of personality. I can’t say Making delivered on much of that. I was really disappointed actually. The first article was on innovative lighting designers, which is something I would normally be really keen to find out about. But the writing just wasn’t very exciting, and some of the things they chose to feature made me feel like perhaps I wasn’t this publication’s target market. I mean, a square pink/orange light with the word ‘love’ in little holes across it? I could get something like that at IKEA. And I love IKEA, but I want to see something new and unexpected when I look in a magazine about crafting and handmade stuff, you know?

The other designers in that article were much more exciting, especially the bit on Fay McCaul, who knits lighting sculptures with electro-luminescent wire. But the writing style combined with the page layouts made the whole magazine start to feel like one big advertising feature.

I moved on to the lampshade tutorial, which actually seemed pretty comprehensive. It’s very step by step and has good pictures going along with it. It also includes useful tips about choosing materials and where to buy supplies. I definitely want to try printing my own lampshades at some point, so I think it will be really useful.

But some of the other tutorials didn’t deliver. The one on how to make the light on the front cover seems to end before it shows you how to put all the origami bits together. There are some diagrams, but a final image of how everything fits together would be helpful. As well as an explanation of how to put the light inside (it tells you to use an LED instead of a regular bulb, but it doesn’t mention the best way of getting it in there).

The tutorial that really irritated me was the one on making a simple tunic blouse. It would have been great if it explained how to adjust the pattern for different sizes. Instead it just told you to copy at 285.5% to make a UK size 10 (that’s a US size 6). Some quick research indicates that the average UK woman wears either a size 14 or 16 (US 10 or 12), so they were way off on the standard they chose to begin with. But I wouldn’t care what size they picked to start if they had included any indication whatsoever about how much to enhance the photocopy if you wanted larger or smaller sizes. I imagine they’re excluding a huge portion of their reader base here. I definitely won’t be using the pattern.

It’s not all negatives though. There’s an amazing looking recipe for hot spiced coconut milk that has me drooling. And there are some tutorials involving designer clay, which I’d never even heard of before, but it looks like something I’d definitely like to experiment with as there’s no baking involved, just combining two different types of clay to make a mix that dries in 24 hours.

Perhaps the most useful thing of all is the number of different suppliers and shops mentioned in the articles, tutorials, and even the adverts. There are all sorts of fabric suppliers and craft shop websites that are UK based, which is incredibly useful for me, because so many of the online shops I see in blogs these days are US based. Some of them ship internationally of course, but that gets expensive, and it’s nice to have a resource for supplies that come from close by.

To Making’s credit, this is only their 4th issue. I think it has potential, but I don’t think they’ve really found their own voice or personality yet. And they really need to concentrate on the details of some of their how-to’s to make them more user-friendly. Unless I see a cover with a topic that I’m super interested in, I probably won’t pick it up again for at least a year. Maybe by then, they’ll have ironed out some of the issues. In the meantime, I’m going to keep looking for a good crafty mag. Anyone have suggestions?

For hands-free luggin' around.

Although I tend to feel like I’m being too lazy all the time, I’ve got a few things that I’ve finished recently, and some other things I’ve started.

The first project is top secret for now, so I can’t post pictures for a few months, but I tried a new skill and did not suck at it, so I’m proud of myself.

Project 2, a yoga mat bag. I got tired of carrying my mat in my hand after one class. I have to bring it to work with me and then bring it most of the way back towards home before I even get to class, so that’s 3 miles before I even unroll it. I made use of some scrap IKEA fabric I had from my sister’s christmas present and whipped this up in about 3 hours. I’m pretty happy with it. The bottom was sort of fiddly, and the stitiching on the top of the strap is kind of crap, but overall, a good result.

Third on the list is a pair of pajama pants, which I don’t actually have a picture of. I’m not too big a fan of the waist, mostly because it relies solely on a drawstring rather than a drawstring plus elastic, but they’ve got super wide legs, and since I made them myself, I was able to make them long enough for my legs, so they’re cozy. The fabric is maroon cotton with little cartoon elephants, giraffes, lions, pineapples, and palm trees. Awesome!

nomnomnom

Next! So I make a lot of cake. I get used to having it around. When it’s not, I can get a little stroppy. Because dammit, I like cake! I don’t want a chocolate bar, I don’t want a lollypop, I might want a cookie depending on what it is, but really, I just want some cake. So I raided my cabinets and my recipe books and decided to make chocolate cupcakes with some raspberries on the top. (I had frozen ones. If I had fresh ones, I would have just eaten them on their own. Scottish raspberries in season are THE BEST IN THE WORLD.) I used Rachel Allen’s chocolate cake recipe for the first time. It’s all right, but it would probably do better with frosting instead of raspberries. For the record, every other cake I’ve made from her book, Bake, so far has been absolutely freaking incredible, so it’s a good book to have. Anyway, that put some cake in my house, and by some miracle, it’s still not gone. Mission accomplished.

I’ve also started a few longer-term things. The first being a batch of homebrewed ginger beer. Scott’s been doing a lot of beer with mixed success rates, but I hadn’t tried anything myself yet. Then I saw our homebrew shop had a ginger beer kit from Coopers, so I jumped on it. It was even easier to brew than a beer kit. I decided it had to be refrigerated for the best result, so this was our first foray into bottling (we’ve just kegged everything else). It seems to have gone well. It tasted pretty good before it went into the bottles, and now we just have to wait 3 weeks til it’s done conditioning. It’s supposed to be about 3.5%ABV, so I’ m looking forward to having properly alcoholic ginger beer around whenever I want it. We’ve got 40 pints of it. I think it will last a while. I might even try making a cake with it.

Soon, there shall be tomatoes.

Last on the list are some tomato plants I started about 3 weeks ago. It was a little late in the season, but they’re coming along nicely. I need to put them in bigger pots soon and hope they do well enough in the window to give me a bunch of tasty tomatoes in a month or two.